John Stamps

From my shoot with local Indianapolis rapper John Stamps. Post processing was hell. A lot of things didn't show up on my laptop that I noticed on a different monitor. This made things long, difficult, and frustrating... especially for a 17 year old who's trying to impress a client. I'm working on a Macbook with retina display and I do all of my post in CS6. I've definitely got some investigating to do so I can make my work look great on any monitor. If anyone has an answer for me, please let me know. I'm desperate and google hasn't been of help. I would assume that for $1500, my computer monitor would come correctly calibrated, but who knows.

 

But as far as shooting, everything went pretty well. I setup shop in his living room... which was extremely small. Not the easiest place to shoot, but it could have been worse. I'd of much rather of been on location outdoors, like many of my successful shots I have gotten previously. But for what I had to work with, I got some great shots. Kevin (John Stamps) is an awesome guy and he pretty much ran the show. The ties and every other prop all were his idea.

 

I used my 22 inch beauty dish for this shoot, along with my homemade strip soft box. Since I was shooting on a black backdrop, I shut down all ambient through camera to avoid showing any wrinkles in the muslin backdrop. Unfortunately, a combination of bad directions to my light guy Alex and light spill resulted in some of my backdrop making a guest cameo in my shot. On my LCD AND my laptop, the backdrop was completely smooth and black. But not so much on other Windows monitors. If I had the money, I'd purchase a seemless backdrop, but I've got many more things higher up on my list of needed equipment.

 

Overall, this was a fun but difficult shoot. This is still the beginning, so all these mistakes are learning experiences.

 

STROBIST INFO:

 

- Canon 430EXII shot through a 22in. beauty dish w/ grid at full power to camera left

 

Done